


Famous Blue Raincoat

by Ika (Dolores_Crane)



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M, PGP AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-22
Updated: 2010-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-13 23:12:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dolores_Crane/pseuds/Ika
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Avon arrives at Gauda Prime, and Deva leaves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Famous Blue Raincoat

For Alison, Fran, and Una, who got me thinking.

 

 _Yes, and thanks for the trouble you took from his eyes  
I thought it was there for good, so I never tried._  
\- Leonard Cohen

PROLOGUE

 _I'm not sure whose the defeat is that has brought me here: mine, or Blake's, or someone else's entirely. There must have been a defeat, though: what else could account for this wasteland of silence that the universe suddenly is?_

 _I look out of the window of the shuttle, feeling defeated, and watch the lights of the only settlement on this yet-another-mined-out planet change from being a thrown handful of spangles below me to being tall and unfamiliar around me, the maze I will have to learn to live in._

 _We land. I take my bag out from under my seat. There's not much to it: I left behind on Gauda, in what I already knew when I made it was a petulant decision which I will regret, most of the few things I'd acquired since I left the smoking ruins of Admindome Five three years ago. Left with nothing but terror and a maimed companion and all the promises the stars in their multiplicity could make me._

 _So, I take my small bag, and get off the shuttle._

 _The pilot - I don't know him; just another comrade - is already on the ground, unloading the crates of arms. We nod at each other as I walk off up the ramp, following arrows towards the admin levels. Resistance bureaucracy is not as cruel as the Federation's, but it exists, of course, and it has to be undergone._

 _"I'm the new computer technician," I say to the worried, balding man at the arrivals desk. "Levick should have told you I'd be coming. I'm Deva Trent."_

 _"Deva?" he repeats, looking up at me for the first time, awed, stricken, and I only just manage to stop myself from bursting out in laughter as I recognize what he is about to say._

 _"But - you're with Blake!"_

 _"Well," I reply, getting a grip on myself: "I was. Now I'm here."_

ONE: THREE WEEKS PREVIOUSLY

I shifted uncomfortably, all of a sudden unused to the hardness of my usual seat in the conference room, as the others began to arrive. Avon was in the first group, his hand under Zeeona's elbow, steering her to her place at the head of the table.

It was my first chance to get a good look at him, really. Having not realized who he was, I'd barely paid attention to him at the opening of negotiations yesterday, beyond half-noticing that he looked done in. He'd sat, white, morose and silent, beside President Zeeona for the first quarter of the morning - until Blake had, finally, spoken directly to him; then he'd snarled something back in a scraped-raw voice and two dots of colour had begun to burn in his cheeks. A few minutes later he had stood up and excused himself. I'd made to go and see if he was all right but Blake was already through the door after him. He'd called "Avon, wait", and once I was sure I'd heard correctly I hadn't needed the meaningful look which had passed between Zeeona and her consort to be unsurprised when they didn't come back to the negotiations that day.

I looked at him now as he took his seat quietly at the head of the table, trying to see whether he was a better-looking version of me or just better-looking than me. _Though,_ I thought, swallowing and dropping my eyes as the serious-eyed, dazzling-smiled, clean young Consort came long-leggedly loping in to take his seat by Zeeona, _if it were looks that Blake picked his boyfriends for, I doubt either of us would..._ \- but then Blake came in and wiped everyone else off the radar.

Oh, my eyes were as hungry for him as ever. I caught myself leaning forward, made myself lean back.

He had been different - suddenly, immediately, already - when he came to our quarters last night to do me the courtesy of offering a redundant explanation (I'm Alpha-level intelligent, despite the Delta classification; I knew, I'd always known, what would happen if Avon ever came back) - but I'd been too unhappy to see exactly what the difference was. Now I watched him, trying to understand.

It was as if whatever had been smouldering inside him for as long as I'd known him had finally caught light. It was as if he had relaxed into that hated stature which, for the past three years, I had watched him keep separate from himself, use like a weapon whose touch disgusted him, the way he had used the bounty-hunter disguise, the filthy clothes, to keep a fastidious distance from his expensive, cheapened name. For the first time since I'd known him, he filled his own outline.

"Good morning," he said to everyone; then, warmly, to the President: "And I must apologize to you for my absence yesterday. Your second and I had a great deal of lost time to make up for." His eyes met Avon's briefly, sparking for a second before his gaze moved round to bathe the remaining delegates in impartial warmth.

"I quite understand," said Zeeona, and I wrenched my attention onto her, trying to judge just how much offence the polite and charming President of the United Planets of Betafarl had taken at the disappearance of our figurehead, our leader, our sun - the one thing we had, surely, that they didn't. I needed to gauge how much ground we would have to regain, since, unlike great romances, planetary alliances aren't made in a transcendental lightning-flash of mutual recognition, but over weeks or months, by tedious labour, patient consideration of possible outcomes, and unremitting attention to detail. All of them, as it happened, strengths of mine.

Unlike great romances.

TWO

 _It wasn't like I left because Blake didn't love me enough. Or not_ just _because Blake didn't love me enough, anyway. But I found out that the Gauda base was a different place than I'd thought, now that I wasn't Blake's lover any more. Against that sudden difference in the texture of my life and my place in the scheme of things, three things happened, and then I left._

THREE

The UPB delegation left behind a flutter of charm and promises from President Zeeona; a blueprint for a five-dimensional communications lattice covering both official (the Gauda Prime Federationizing Movement) and unofficial (Blake's private army) channels; and Avon. And, I suspect, Orac as well, though no-one ever told me for sure one way or the other.

I went down to say goodbye to Levick, my opposite number on the Betafarl side: then I mooched down the corridor, feeling put out and at a loose end, wondering what the little scene played out in the exit chamber between Avon and Consort Tarrant had been about and why Vila the not-quite-as-legendary wasn't coming to Gauda ( _no,_ Tarrant had said, _not ever_ ).

I didn't fancy going to the bar. Klyn was off tonight, and the regular soldiers tended to distrust the front-line bureaucrats: perhaps rightly, since there was never any way to be sure where a signature might end up pointing or whom it might end up killing. At least the regulars might be able to keep themselves honest - or something like it - by seeing the faces of their kills. The way Blake did, these days.

I went to my quarters for a bit but they made me feel windswept and desolate: I'd let Blake keep the bigger rooms we'd shared, in the end, because I couldn't face the thought of a constant stream of people forgetting he'd moved out and knocking mistakenly at my door, but I wasn't used to having so much clutterless, Blakeless space to myself. I wandered off to the main workroom, in the end.

I walked through the door, distracted, and Avon looked up, scowled, and said: "What are you doing here?"

It wasn't my night.

"What am _I_ doing here?" I repeated, staring at him. "I live here."

"So you do," he said, and closed his mouth.

"I was going to make a start on that lattice," I explained to the silence, stupidly.

"No need," he said, getting up and pocketing a laser probe with a flourish (I had no idea what he could have needed it for). "I have installed it."

"Oh," I said, and went to the bar after all, and wished I hadn't, because Blake was there, and got a drink and sat down anyway. There was a crowded, edgy feel to the room that night: tense; the sort of feeling there usually was before a battle or a mass posting to another base, or at least before a brawl; it was strange. My mind was jumping about all over the place. I thought about Avon putting his hand on Consort Tarrant's arm when they said goodbye and then withdrawing it and staring at it, his own hand, as if he didn't know what it was; I thought about Tarrant saying _no, not ever_ to Blake and looking at Avon. I thought about the never-should-have-happened glimpse behind the wire in the resettlement compound, which had taught me how lethal a signature could be and sent me spinning dizzy out of Admindome Five with my maimed lover and brought me here. I heard scraps of lyrics from the song machine ( _cold but I like where... my brother, my... free_ ), scraps of conversation: _now that Avon's here, we... What shift are you...? Blake said... going to change... antitoxin, Zeeona, Avon, Orac._

Even if I hadn't been looking at Blake I would have been able to tell where he was from the heliotropic, shining faces of the people around him at each moment. I winced and stopped looking at him, but my skin still knew where he was, every moment. I knew when he beckoned to Avon, standing at the door; I knew when he gave up and went to join Avon, leaving the bar, instead.

But then, so did everyone else.

The room cooled down a little, took a breath, lit what might as well have been a post-coital cigarette. I started on my fourth beer, feeling my face go slightly numb and buzzy, thought about five-dimensional lattices and signatures, listened to scraps of lyrics, scraps of conversation, until I realized I'd been following the discussion at the next table for a few minutes: how different it would all be now: how we were finally going to get somewhere: how Blake was going to be able to make a decisive move at last: Zeeona, antitoxin, Orac, Avon. On his white horse, Avon, with his magic potion, fighting tall beside Blake, rescuing us from tedious labour and unremitting attention to detail and pettifoggery. (How could anyone instal a five-dimensional lattice in under an hour, anyway?) I smiled bitterly to myself.

"Are _you_ pleased Avon's finally got here?" someone suddenly, sweetly, asked me. I looked up at the three regulars at the next table: Col was smiling unpleasantly at me while his friends, Dirch and Mofferey grinned like goons in the background. They were all waiting for me to answer. I wondered what they had against me.

"None of your business," I said and returned to my beer.

"Fair enough, fair enough," said Col, spreading his hands innocently. "No offence meant, mate," then, into his beer as Dirch and Mofferey laughed ho-ho, all-friends-here, "Poof."

I gaped for a second - three years on Gauda, where had this suddenly come from? - and then "Ohhh," I said, enlightened, and perhaps less sober than I could have been. "Tell me, are you jealous of me for getting to fuck him in the first place, or angry with me for getting dumped and making you scared he'll leave you as well? Well, I'm sorry I didn't conduct your vicarious love affair more successfully."

Col shook his head, sickened, superior. "You lot," he said, "you think everything has to be about sex, don't you? Disgusting."

I stared at him, utterly unable to believe it.

"You do _know_ Blake's queer, don't you? I mean, you do know _why_ he's so happy Avon's turned up?"

He rolled his eyes, turned away, back to his friends: not worth an answer, obviously. Although, to be scrupulously fair to him, I don't know what truthful answer he could have made, unless his culture had a separate category for poofs-who-are-Blake. Which some do, of course: well, Gauda did, it seemed, though I hadn't known about it till now.

FOUR

I definitely could have been more sober. My feet forgot about the new status quo; my head was buzzing too much to remind them; and I nearly palm-printed my not-yet-overridden way into Blake's room before the sound of voices from behind the door stopped me.

 _... didn't have to lay an entire planetary system and an antitoxin at my feet, Avon._

 _Don't be stupid._

A silence, during which I should have left, then:

 _I wasn't going to rely on my natural charisma. And you can't tell me you're not grateful for the help. You were getting nowhere on your own, it seems._

 _Not quite nowhere, Avon_ (not _not on my own,_ I noticed).

Another silence, during which I did leave.

FIVE

I was scratchy and restless at first the next morning, unable to concentrate, getting up to make more tea before I'd finished the last cup, wasting more time than I could afford kicking about the front-base office and pestering Klyn to poach more targets from Tando, which wasn't really what I should have been doing: I had urgent GPFM business to get on with. Well, of course: I always had GPFM business to get on with. There were four hundred main criteria which had to be met before our application for the restoration of the penal code could be considered in the first instance.

I sighed, finished my cup of tea, resolved for the nth time that day to stop procrastinating and not get up from my desk until the data on serious injuries protocol had been collated, and got up to make another cup of tea. And there was Blake in the doorway, looking happy and transformed.

"Morning," I said. "Avon not taking over in here, then?"

I hadn't managed to keep the bitterness out of my voice, but Blake laughed, oblivious. "No, no," he said. His voice was fond; his fondness was directed somewhere past me. "He's not interested in the Federationizing Movement: he says the whole business is ludicrous and he despairs of me... I don't know, though, Deva: maybe he's right. We've got a real chance now, anyway, with the antitoxin and the United Betafarlians behind us."

His gaze, which had always heated my cold bones and swept me up in his strength and his conviction, was as steady and intense as ever, but stronger, as if he had found a better power source. It struck me like a blow: all that passion that had never been aimed at me, although I had put myself in its path.

"You shit," I said wonderingly.

He blinked, then said carefully: "Deva..."

"I love you," I said: I sent the words off like a little rocket-ship with my heart inside it, and I watched it burn up in the heat around him. It made no more than a momentary brightness at his furthest edge, and then it fell entirely into ashes; there had been nothing in it strong enough to survive the journey, to get the message through to him.

I watched him take a breath and remember to be kind.

"Deva," he said again, gently, putting a gentle hand on my arm.

It was the oddest feeling. Rather like the opposite of love at first sight.

"I love you too," he said matter-of-factly.

I suddenly saw him closed off from me. I saw that I had only ever been orbiting him, warming myself at a safe distance from the heat he radiated.

"But," he added, unnecessarily - surely he knew it was unnecessary? - "not like Avon."

It was rather exhilarating, actually; suddenly feeling light enough to break this interminable orbit.

"Fuck you, Blake," I said, rather more cheerfully.

SIX

 _No, I didn't leave because Blake didn't love me enough. I didn't leave because Col was a wanker, either, or because Avon was so good at my job there wasn't much for me to do, or even because Avon and Blake were on the scale of a natural disaster next to my candle of a heart, or because Avon had healed Blake into a different person from the maimed man I'd loved. Not really. I left because when I saw the others in the base look up at Blake like puppies overjoyed with praise, I recognized how I'd felt about him, and it was... well, it was embarrassing._

 _So I suppose I left because I was embarrassed._

SEVEN

I'd said my goodbyes, and Levick had found a position for me on some other yet-another-mined-out planet.

I watched the lights of the Gauda spaceport dwindle into a pretty pattern, a scatter of thrown spangles: then I pushed my head back into the headrest, gripped the arms of my seat, and prepared for the euphoria that the moment of breaking orbit always gives me, like a reward in advance for the cramped tedium of shuttle flight to the next, cramped, tedious destination.

END


End file.
